“Owners of Android smartphones are being warned to avoid public WiFi networks after researchers found a security flaw that could affect the vast majority of devices based on Google’s software,” Tim Bradshaw reports for The Financial Times.

“A trio of researchers at Ulm University in Germany found that it was ‘quite easy’ for hackers to intercept data from Google’s photo-sharing, calendar and contacts applications, as well as potentially other Google services such as Gmail, using a flaw that affects 99 per cent of all Android devices,” Bradshaw reports. “In March, Google was forced to remove more than 50 rogue applications, which could have stolen data or sent costly messages, from tens of thousands of Android devices.”

Bradshaw reports, “Google said of the flaw: ‘We’re aware of this issue, have already fixed it for calendar and contacts in the latest versions of Android, and we’re working on fixing it in Picasa.’ However, according to the researchers, the flaw still affects devices running older versions of Android, which make up 99.7 percent of Google smartphones in use today.”

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One Comment

You’re a few days late, and the inflammatory reporting, far beyond the scope of the actual issue, is hardly a surprise. For there to be ANY risk of data security being compromised takes a whole set of Doomsday Scenario circumstances – Google is pushing out the fix for Android users over the next few days, NOT requiring A2.3.4 – just a hotfix which I’m guessing will shorten the authToken lifespan or prevent autosync over open/unencrypted wifi or any number of solutions. Meanwhile, this “99%” headline, which isn’t even really relavent to the issue itself (it’s a statistic of how many iterations of Android phones already have 2.3.4, as though that is the only solution), which started with The Register, will continue to fly around for months. Haters Gonna Hate.